2018년 9월 10일 월요일

Today, I have decided to revive one of the less
"academic" features of Q Branch prior to my unexpected hiatus in 2013
due to health reasons, Il Cento notti di orrore or The One Hundred Nights of Horror
series.After Q Branch had been
relaunched, I was pretty much trying to use WATCHA and Twitter as archiving
platforms for the films I watch, but I have grown frustrated over them for
various reasons.Make no mistake, I like
Twitter (although the stinking presence of The Great Orange Leader there is
almost enough for me to quit it altogether sometimes), but trying to archive my
movie watching habits there has become a bit like trying to subsist on eating
cupcakes and party mixes only.WATCHA is
a great movie-watching app but is very thoroughly Korean, and too focused on
those movies connected to Korea (at least so far, in 2018). So I have come back
to try it out again in the blog space.Below
I have cut and pasted the rambling introductory remarks I have written in 2013,
pretty much the way it was, only updating a few time-specific references.

The
cinematic art itself may be biting the dust worldwide, as the endless parade of
Marvel and DC superheroes colonize Hollywood, the indie cinema is selling out,
film studies graduate students are watching source materials via Netflix
streaming in their spare time, left over from decoding hallowed writings of Lacan and Deleuze, and Lars von Trier is
lauded as the world's greatest filmmaker.But hey, horror cinema is alive and well.Even if future consumers of cinema would have
to watch their “movies” on six-inch screens
attached to their wrist-phones, you can guarantee there will be horror films,
about haunted Google Glasses, your latest wonder drug with a side effect of
turning you into a purple-skinned carnivore (“Your loved ones suddenly crave
meat!!”), even maybe a teenage space-shuttle astronaut
vampire, who loves inhaling human blood globule by
floating globule, in the zero gravity.

Watching
horror films has always been one of the less
mentionable-in-polite-companycultural habits of mine. And you are right to call on this sense of mild embarrassment as
hypocritical. After
all, what dumb English lit major would publicly state that Edgar Allan Poe is
inferior to, say, Herman Melville, because the former mostly wrote
morbid stories about the supernatural? My closest friends and loved ones can
certainly testify to my ongoing and never-flagging love of the genre.My wife, Angela, remembers me sauntering off
to catch the third installment of Hellraiser playing at a Somerville
theater all by myself, in between caffeine-induced bouts of paper-writing and
seminar preparation.In
my youthful days a dinner conversation could easily slide off to a loving
description of the effects of a “Stonehenge chip” embedded inside the Silver
Shamrock Halloween mask in Season of the Witch... you get the idea.

Now
I am enjoying motion pictures on a staggering variety
of platforms--
In addition to Netflix, Hulu Plus, Vudu, Film Struck, Amazon, Shout! Factory TV (such a thing truly exists… I am
currently fast-forward watching, of all crazy things, Ultraman Leo on it) and other glut of streaming and VOD services, I
still catch a chunk of horror films not only through Blu Rays and DVDs but at
the local theaters--
and horror genre is far from shrinking in proportion and importance in terms of
my movie-going life. It certainly remains an important sector of
the archival Blu Rays and DVDs I purchase-- especially among the cinema of '70s
and '80s-- but even among relatively new films, its power and influence have
not diminished.Now whether there are more
good horror films these days than, say, '80s: that's
another set of ballgame. Has the quality horror cinema gone the ways of civil
discourse in American politics and VHS tapes? Or are we in fact facing another
renaissance of ingenious and creative horror cinema?

So
I had this idea of watching one hundred horror films in one year,
regardless of national origins or year of production, the only condition being
that I watch them in proper venues (with the correct aspect
ratio, preferably HD presentation) and that I have not
laid my eyes on them before.Call it
a tribute to horror cinema from a fan.In terms of Korean cinema, I am politically
more invested in seeing a truly excellent SF film (a goal partially met in 2013
with the release of Bong Jun-ho's majestic Snowpiercer), but that's for
the future happiness of South Koreans. For the future happiness and
philosophical growth of the mankind (I hope you do not take my pronouncements
as juvenile humor or even misplaced irony, thus revealing your hideous cultural
prejudices against the genre: I will remind you again, Edgar Allan Poe did
HORROR. Mary Shelley did HORROR. Dostoevsky did HORROR. Goethe did HORROR. The
truly great masters ALL did horror), we could still do much more with horror.

As I am reviving this series in September 2018, I will
give it until December 31, 2019, to tally up one hundred horror films. I don't
think this will be difficult at all, in terms of keeping up with the supplies.
Shucks, I could probably fill in the quota even if I limit myself to only Asian
horror films, or North American ones. I will also discard my long-held
feature-film-only prejudice and include TV series and short films in the roster:
the rather arbitrary rule of thumb will be to count three or four episodes of a
series or the same amount of short films as one feature film, although
obviously exceptions could be made.

A word regarding the format: I am not going to list
the usual detailed staff and cast information, and the reviews will be shorter
than my full-on Blu Ray-DVD reviews, or other academic pieces such as
interviews with scholarly colleagues or creative personages.A word on the star rating system: I use the
black-and-white star ratings system developed by the Japanese film critic and hardboiled mystery specialist Futaba Juzaburo 双葉十三郎(1910-2009), with a white star ☆counting
for twenty points, and a black star★for five points. The average score falls somewhere
between fifty five ☆☆★★★ and sixty ☆☆☆, as few movies actually
score less than twenty points.I might
drop the star ratings after a while, as rating the movies is really not the
point of these lists. It is really for 1) archiving my movie-watching habits,
and 2) discussing the evolution of cinematic horror as an ineradicable
component of the broader cultural expression of the global mankind.

1. Down a Dark Hall (U.S.-Spain, 2018). A
Fickle Fish/Nostromo/Temple Hill Entertainment Production. 1 hour 36 minutes. Widescreen
2.35:1. Directed by Rodrigo Cortes. Screenplay by Michael Goldbach, Chris
Sarling, based on a novel by Lois Duncan. iTunes, Rented. Down a Dark Hall brings together two strong trends of today's genre
cinema, the Spanish-language Gothic thriller tradition on the one hand, and
young adult literary resources a la Hunger
Games and The Maze series, on the
other.The result is reasonably well
constructed but entirely predictable Gothic hokum, with the central idea that
really sounds like it was daydreamed up by a suburban-bourgeois teenager sick
and tired of having to go through piano lessons or math tutoring classes.

Considering the
already existing countless stories about girl's boarding school it would have
required some other ingenious turn of events to elevate Down a Dark Hall above average. But the filmmakers have little
ideas other than the admittedly interesting casting of Thurman in the
tyrannical headmistress role (she seems to be a tad too sincere: a kind of
droll, Lynn Redgrave-on-oxycodone approach might have worked better).AnnaSophia Robb does what is required as the
suitably harried young heroine Kit, but the materials she is given to work with
are just not up to the snuff.Rodrigo
Cortes, director of Buried (2010) and
Red Lights (2012), keeps the kettle
boiling and the Blackwood Boarding School set is pretty impressive.Jarin Blaschke's (The Witch [2015]) cinematography, while plenty atmospheric,
sometimes becomes so pitch-black as to entirely obscure the goings-on.Probably appropriate for a popcorn-munching
spook-show screening during a junior-high girls' slumber party (they wouldn't
know Uma Thurman from Meryl Streep, I suppose?), I was not seriously bored with
the film, but still can't give it a score higher than ☆☆★★★.

2. Cold Skin/La piel fria (Spain-France,
2017). A Babieka/The Ink Connection/Kanzaman/ Pontas Film & Literary Agency
Co-Production. 1 hour 48 minutes. Widescreen 2:35:1. Directed by Xavier Gens.
Screenplay by Jesus Olmo & Eron Sheean, based on a novel by Albert Sanchez
Piñol. Purchased, iTunes. Cold Skin is another classically-oriented
horror opus filmed in English language with the British leads but dominated by
the Spanish-Catalan sensibility. The director is Xavier Gens, who has primarily
worked in the Francophone cinema, and, as evidenced by his previous films, Frontier(s) (2007) and The Divide (2011), has tended to
gravitate toward the characters in confinement forced to reveal their
animal-like true colors.This particular
film, about a young, unnamed weather observer (David Oakes) stationed at an
isolated Antarctic island (nicely location-shot at Canary Islands and Iceland)
running afoul of a disgruntled, possibly insane lighthouse technician Gruner
(Ray Stevenson) as well as a horde of amphibian humanoid creatures, is
inevitably going to be compared to Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape of Water.There is
even a female humanoid christened Aneris (impressively embodied by the Spanish
actress Aura Garrido under layers of blue-grey latex) who Gruner keeps as a
sexual slave.

The creatures and the
desolate, salt-bitten island-scape are quite effectively drawn, and the screenplay
does not dawdle on, quickly introducing the otherworldly menace and keeping the
viewers on their toes for the most part.The human characters, on the other hand, are simply not interesting.
Gruner is such a thoroughly unsympathetic rapist-cum-mass-murdering-scumbag that the young meteorologist's initial
willingness to join in the former's daily routine of extermination campaign
against the humanoids comes across either as a form of transmitted madness, or
an irredeemable moral failure on the latter's part (possibly both?). Gens possibly
intended all this as a political allegory (heavy-handed references to the
genocidal character of the First World War,-- the movie is set in 1914,
following the source novel, I assume-- not to mention a groan-inducing epigram
taken from Nietzsche-- that's right, that "you gaze into the abyss and the
abyss gazes into you" jazz--, seems to corroborate this interpretation),
but without a sympathetic character or even a relatable villain, the movie tends
to fall back on creature-attack action scenes and other monster-movie boogaboo
stuff.Concerning those things, at
least, this film is not too bad.

I didn't expect Cold Skin to be as powerful or genuinely
weird as The Shape of Water or Splice (2009), but given its
considerable technical prowess, I wish it had the temerity to swim beyond its sub-Jack-London,
men-are-the-true-beasts literary-trope atoll and to genuinely surprise the
viewers. ☆☆☆

Well the class is
starting soon, and I still have many, many things to do, so I will resume at
No. 3 hopefully in a few days.I know, I
know, it is a constant struggle to keep the blog going, but seeing that some of
the people I know or read, who are far more prolific and diligent than I am,
eventually shut their blogs down or keep them unattended for months on end, I take solace in the fact that this problem is not unique to me.